


kulning

by Star_on_a_Staff



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe, Animal Death, Blood and Violence, Canonical Character Death, Cougars, F/M, Fluff, Hunter!Felix, Hunting, Knives, Light Angst, Minor Angst, Mountains, Nature, Pastoral AU, Pastures, Romance, Seasons, Shepherdess!Annnette, Shepherding, Singing, Valleys, but like, even in AU's glenn can't catch a break, kulning, no beta we die like Glenn, rifles, the actual animal, too many goddamn kennings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-30
Updated: 2020-01-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:41:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22474999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Star_on_a_Staff/pseuds/Star_on_a_Staff
Summary: Kulning or herding calls: a domestic Scandinavian music form, often used to call livestock (cows, goats, etc.) down from high mountain pastures where they have been grazing during the day.Or; Shepherdess!Annette sings her flocks home and Hunter!Felix is low-key (high-key) fascinated with her. Felix/Annette, in a vaguely Pastoral AU. NOW WITH FANART BY LUNA CHAI LI
Relationships: Annette Fantine Dominic/Felix Hugo Fraldarius
Comments: 47
Kudos: 194





	kulning

**Author's Note:**

> I come from a place where learning about hunting is unavoidable. So after an overload of a few fun facts I jotted this down. 
> 
> This fic is also the testing grounds of a new writing style (called Too Many Kennings and Nature Metaphors) because I like to change those suckers like I change my shoes. Forgive me. 
> 
> There's quite a bit of animal violence in here, so please take note of that.
> 
> I recommend watching [this video](https://youtu.be/KvtT3UyhibQ) first to understand what kulnings sound like!! They're quite haunting and gorgeous <3 
> 
> Also I solemnly ask you as the author to please envision all of Annette's sheep as Wooloos. All of them are Wooloos. Roly poly Wooloos. Wooloos everywhere. 
> 
> Okay, thank you. Please enjoy!
> 
> 7/04 edit: The fanart below is by the amazing and inimitable Lunachaili, who is amazing and deserves so much love and attention! She was kind enough to draw this for my birthday and I'm still in tears over how beautiful it looks; please send her all hugs and kisses [here!](https://twitter.com/lunachaili) <3

  
hearth of home, heart of hearth, home of heart

_._

_summer_

He’s tracking the imprints of a buck’s hooves in the springy moss when he hears her voice.

The herding call rings through in the early morning silence of the grey-green valley. It’s haunting, eerie, and fey, almost like some faerie song from deep within the silent green forests from the stories that Mother used to tell him as a child.

Felix makes his way through the underbrush, towards that strange, lilting song like it is bait and he is his own prey being lured out of familiar territory. The morning dew dripping from the ferns and toadstools he brushes by dampens his leather braces and the fletchings of his quarrels, and yet he finds that he doesn’t care.

When the forest finally releases him onto a vast open plain shimmering under a pale morning sun, Felix stumbles to a stop at the sight before him.

A shepherdess with hair the color of a blazing hearth stands on the plain with her white hands cupped around her mouth. She pitches her voice to carry, the sweet shrill call reverberating across the grass as sky-grey sheep amble towards her from every direction. Their lowing, deep and throaty, only compliments her call.

The shepherdess bends down to scratch a ewe’s ruff. Her dreamy singing breaks and bubbles into a very human, girlish laugh. The ewe begins to chew on her skirts and she swats it lightly, scolding it.

Felix watches her from under the arms of the silent green trees and wonders why his heart is aching.

The shepherdess straightens her back and scans the plain for any stray sheep. Her eyes land on his lurking shadow under the branches of the green-barked trees and she freezes, her eyes wide.

Felix realizes belatedly that he must cut a rather terrifying figure. His hunting bow, a tall ancient thing passed down from his late father, is in his hands, and he’s crouched under the trees like he’s ready to pounce. His hands are rock-steady on the bow, and he’s holding his breath as if he’s waiting for the kill shot.

However, the shepherdess doesn’t scream or flee. She simply watches him, her knuckles white around the shepherd’s crook in her hands. Her eyes blaze blue fire at him; it’s not a hostile warning, but rather a wary challenge.

 _Why are you here? Why are you looking at me like that?_ Her eyes ask questions that he can’t answer. 

For a moment they stare at each other as the summer-laden breeze whispers in their hair. 

Eventually, they break out of their trance when the sun yawns and bursts out of the horizon in all its mid-morning glory. The sudden rays of subsequent sunshine sears in between them like a curtain, and Felix releases his breath all at once, his heart pounding as if he’s been riding for miles.

The shepherdess shakes herself out of her own reverie, casting one more suspicious glance towards him like he’s planning on filching one of her lambs if she were to turn her back on him. But she tosses her head and resumes her song, beckoning her sheep homewards as she strolls away with a light, lilting step.

For one absurd, brief snatch of time, Felix longs to join her flocks and follow her home. He shakes himself with a frustrated growl. Winter is creeping upon them swiftly, and even a pretty fire-headed shepherdess will suffer under its silencing frost.

Felix turns and begins heading back into the forest. He curses lowly and runs an irritated hand through his hair. He’s lost the buck.

.

.

.

_autumn_

Summer dies with a quiet emerald sigh and gives way into a golden-red autumn. It's the season for blackberries, mushrooms, trout, and most relevant to Felix, elk.

Felix spots and tracks a finely built male through the greying forest. The elk’s fat flanks shifts as it grazes, lifting up its great head occasionally to look warily about the sighing depths of the forest. Felix kneels by a stream and lifts his bow slowly, noiselessly. He breathes out.

A growl rips through the air, deep and chilling. Felix startles, his bow discharging carelessly, and the elk screams. Something huge and bulky plunges through the undergrowth, and Felix feels his heart drop into his stomach at the sight of foaming jaws, of sinewy muscles under rippling tan hide.

Cougars almost never leave the mountains. But this one looks unnaturally starved, even during the season when the deer are at their most plump, when the streams teem with fish and the sheep have finished grazing on the last of the juicy summer grass. This cougar got careless, and has become so desperate it’s willing to challenge a human for its dinner.

Felix stands slowly, the pulse point in his neck throbbing. The cougar bares its teeth at him, and for a tense, tight moment, the hunter is sure that the beast will pounce.

But the cougar seems satisfied with his lack of movement. It flashes its teeth at him one more time, and then turns to the struggling elk. Felix winces at the audible crack of bone as the cougar clamps its jaws around the elk’s neck, and it begins tugging its prey to the north, where the craggy mountain looms.

When the tan tail swishes out of view, Felix falls to his knees on the underbrush and dry-heaves.

“Never challenge a cougar, kid.” Glenn had once said, on a winter night long ago. They were watching a scraggly female lope away into the forest, its ribs flashing with its every step. “They remember. They’ve lived so long in the mountain that they’ve begun thinking like the damn thing; cruel stony thoughts.”

Felix trembles and claws for breath. The memory of his brother’s knife-like smile still shines in every gleam of the cougar’s claw, in every flash of slit-amber eyes. It still shakes him, snaking around his sanity and his cold façade of stability and shatters it all in a single moment, running through his head like a child’s inconsolable wail.

_Glenn’s body, mauled beyond recognition, with only the familiar four-claw rake over the chest to divulge what had killed him_

Just when Felix is sure that he’s going to asphyxiate, a single haunting cry swirls from the fading green valley. It’s faint, and faraway, but it’s unmistakable. A herding call.

It’s a different one than the summer summon. This one is shorter, bursting from female lips in staccato bursts of urgency. Summer was coaxing; autumn is a warning. But it’s no less dulcet, no less beautiful, and before he knows it Felix is scrambling to his feet and stumbling through the underbrush to chase her song. 

The shepherdess’ call pulls him towards the open valley like a physical touch. It beckons, it grasps, it yanks him like a fishing net up to the surface of coherence. It tickles his heart and cuts it deep at once, like the steel traps that he lays out for the hares in the morning. 

Felix bursts from the forest onto the valley’s open plain. The shepherdess is there as usual, her white dress fluttering around her ankles as she counts her flocks. The pale whiteness of her skin is only heightened by the fire of her hair, the flame of the valley, and the deep mournful blue of the sky. Her song echoes like a trail of mist from her mouth. 

Felix’s heart slows its frantic pace to a slow, curious beat. The shepherdess has lifted a tottering lamb to her shoulders, laughing as it promptly begins nibbling at her hair. She’s much less fey like this, her cheek dripping with sheep saliva and tangled with chewed grass. She’s graceless, flushed, and so utterly human. It reminds him of home.

The shepherdess catches sight of him. Instead of recoiling like in the summer, she simply grins and waves the lamb’s front hoof at him. Her white teeth shine through plush lips at him in a berry- sweet smile. 

“Good hunting!” She calls to him, her voice amber like honey and brighter than quicksilver. 

He’s too stunned to do anything than inclining his head at her dumbly, like a struck fool. Her warm enthusiasm reminds him of his childhood, of championship wrestling matches with Glenn in the leaves, Father carving the choicest birds for Harvest’s Fest, and of Mother laughing as she burrowed herself into a mountain of hand-sewn quilts smelling like the deepest apple brew. 

_Hearth of home, heart of hearth, home of heart_ , they used to call to each other as the sun plunged into the ink-black horizon. A reminder of what drove them every day through the hottest of summers and the bitterest of winters. 

It has been years since he had let such memories bubble back to the surface like this. The encounter with the cougar must have really shook him. 

The shepherdess has set the lamb back on the ground, giggling at the way it teeters unsteadily towards its grey ewe-mother like it’s walking on wooden stilts. She waves at him with her free hand and whistles for her flock to follow her home. 

Felix lingers on the outskirts of the forest a moment longer. He’s not ready to let go of this soft warm feeling nestled in his chest just yet. But soon her shepherd’s crook bobs out of sight, the last of the baaing sheep ambling away towards the base of the valley, and then the open plain is silent but for the whisper of the drying grass.

Felix hefts his bow mechanically and walks slowly back into the forest. His heart is pounding again, his pulse thrumming as if another cougar had appeared before him.

One had, actually. And she had sunk her claws deep into the center of his heart. 

.

.

.

_winter_

Winter rips open autumn's chest and spills its silver blood over the land. The valley becomes whiter than ocean froth, and the trees become black stubby fingers that grasp at the sky like the forest is trying to borrow the sun’s warmth again.

As a hunter, Felix enjoys winter. There aren’t any summer insects to break his concentration, and deer tracks are easier to follow in the broken snow. Bears have gone to den, birds to roost, and it eases the contest over prey considerably. 

The shepherdess’ sheep have become clouds. Their huge poofs of wool make them look twice their size, and the shepherdess has taken to burying her bare hands in their fluff whenever she gets cold. Not that Felix watches her closely enough that he notices this. That’s far beyond the normal bounds of courtesy, or even proper human behavior. 

But the shepherdess has become accustomed to his lurking presence at the edge of the forest by now. She smiles at him, but doesn’t leave her flocks to greet him or speak to him besides the occasional “Good morning!”, or “Stay dry!” whenever sleet paints the valley silver. 

Felix doesn’t ever know what to say to her besides the obvious replies, like “Thank you’, or “And to you,” which he had accidentally said to her once after she wished him “Good hunting!” which he despaired over for a good portion of an agonized week before he dared to show his face to her again. 

But her herding call never fails to erase the furrow beneath his brows or the ache in his chest, and it becomes a regular habit to make his rounds around the outside of the forest to catch the strains of her herding cry every morning before he plunges back into the unforgiving silence of the snow-drenched woods.

Everything changes one bitterly cold day.

He’s busy the entire first half of the day tracking and felling two magnificent bucks, and spends most of the latter half skinning and gutting them in preparation for market. It’s well into the evening when he’s finally making the rounds around the forest to check his traps when a sudden shrieking cry echoes through the valley, loud and terrified. 

It’s not a beautiful herding call. It’s the scream of a girl in terror and rage. 

Felix doesn’t think. He runs, careless of sound or grace, nearly tripping over every hidden root and patch of ice that lies in his path. But the screaming doesn’t peter away, and in the dead silence that winter brings to the valley, it’s shriller than death.

He bursts out onto the snowy plain. The sheep are scattered each and every way, running as fast as their stubby little legs can carry them away from danger, lowing with terror. In the center of the plain, two rams lie dead in the snow, their throats worried to strips as blood oozes and melts the snow beneath them.

A bleeding little lamb lies crumpled by the shepherdess’ feet, its hind leg dangling. The shepherdess grips her shepherd’s crook in both hands, her teeth gritted as her braced feet tremble on the snow. A starving cougar growls through a mouthful of the staff, trying to bat at her with its huge, four-pronged claws, and Felix doesn’t hesitate this time.

He unslings the bow from his shoulders, tosses it aside, and unholsters the single bolt-action rifle from his shoulders. It’s loaded, it’s been cleaned and well maintained, and he has no idea if the shot will discharge since the last person who’d used it had been Glenn, but all Felix can do is roar, “DON’T MOVE,” at the shepherdess as he primes the weapon, aims, and fires. 

The rifle’s discharge shatters the muteness of the valley. The sheep scream. The shepherdess stumbles backwards and sits down hard, her crook snapped clean in half as the cougar’s body jerks violently, a fine spray of blood flying from its jaw as it recoils and stumbles in the snow. 

Felix is running closer, hurriedly reloading for another shot (yank the bolt up, fit in a cartridge, slap the bolt back down, lift the weapon, it’s all far too _slow_ ), but the dying cougar is already rising for its final kill, its bloody jaw yawning open to snap around the fire headed girl’s neck-

He doesn’t see her dart forward until the sun glints off the knife in her hands, and before Felix could scream or shoot or do anything at all the shepherdess has plunged the huge serrated monstrosity into the cougar’s throat, right up to the hilt.

This time, when the cougar falls, it’s for the last time. It flops around once, twice on the reddened snow, twitches, and finally relaxes into death with a last elegical death rattle.

Felix all but crashes into the shepherdess’ side. She’s panting hard, a mist of blood over her cheeks, but she seems generally unhurt as he holds out his hand wordlessly.

She takes it, and he heaves her up. Her legs wobble underneath her and she stumbles into his chest, breathing hard.

“Are you alright?” Felix asks, his gloved fingers gripping the meat of her arm. 

The shepherdess sucks in frost-bitten air through her teeth, and she smiles shakily at him. “I’m alright. Thank you.”

He introduces himself. She laughs at the funny beautiful absurdity of finally meeting each other, and tells him that she's Annette Dominic. He finally puts a name to the voice, and suddenly feels a strange sort of gratefulness to the dead cougar. 

Annette sings what’s left of her frightened herds back to herself. From far away, her herding call sounds like a faraway dream, like something out of a fairy tale. But up close, the cry takes on a wild gorgeous rawness. It’s soft and powerful and velvet-sharp all at once, thrumming through him like the discharge of a rifle, like the wild snarl of a beast, like a knife to his throat. Her call cages him and roots him to the snowy earth like two steel traps of his own make. He is her prey, her captive, her prisoner. 

And freedom is the furthest thing from his mind. 

The sheep trundle towards the shepherdess slowly, cautiously. They see the dead bodies of their brothers and falter, but Annette adds a coaxing vibrato to her call, and they wobble towards her. They surround her until she’s in an ocean of soft fleece. She buries her blue-white fingers in their wool and weeps over them. 

Felix feels a gentle pressure on his foot. He looks down to see the tiny bloodied lamb on three legs butting his boot, bleating plaintively up at him. He bends down and lifts the weightless creature into his arms, stroking its blood-slicked fleece. It shivers and nestles into its chest. 

“Aww, she likes you.” Annette smiles at him, untangling her fingers from the damp wool.

“I’ll walk you home.” He says impulsively. Her smile makes him brave and weak all at once.

She beams. “I’d like that.”

They walk home, and for the first time Felix gets to listen to the herding call play out in its entirety. He follows her to her pens with the lamb cradled to his chest, and Annette has difficulty trying to extricate the stubborn little thing from his arms. 

“She thinks you’re her mother.” Annette teases, running a hand down its small ruff. The tips of her fingers brush his chest with every up and down motion, and Felix regrets nothing. 

“Would that make you the father then?” He says with a very small smile coloring his voice. 

Annette starts, flushes pink, and bursts into a giggle. “I suppose so.” 

The lamb bleats irritably as Annette tries again to pull her from Felix’s arms. Finally, she gives up, leaning back so her hands rest on her hips. 

“I suppose you’ll have to care for her until she’s old enough to pasture.” Annette pronounces with the solemnity of a judge, stroking the lamb softly as it burrows into Felix’s elbow with a satisfied beep. 

Felix asks while the adrenaline of the fight and her proximity is still flowing through him. “Will you come visit her then? To check on her progress?”

The words in between the lines hang in the frosty air, and Annette’s hand pauses on the lamb’s tiny head. After an agonizing eternity, she resumes her caresses, and this time on the downstroke she slides her hand down and rests it on his forearm. 

“Yeah.” Annette smiles up at him, beatific in the light of her cabin’s hearth. “I will.”

Felix walks home with a baby lamb in his arms and a heart singing louder than a thousand herding calls. 

.

.

.

_spring_

New life quietly comes to reign in the valley. Shoots of green poke out through the snow, crocuses and daffodils, and thrushes have begun building their nests.

The valley blooms green and verdant, the spring grass slender and dewy. Annette’s flocks are ready for shearing. The deer have had their fawns, and soon the bears will be climbing out of their dens. Prey will be hard to come by.

But he has Annette. 

Felix comes to her often now, no longer suffering from that once-unbridgeable distance called unfamiliarity. And he brings her gifts, like offerings, unsaid sentiments. A brand new shepherd's crook carved from a walnut bough. A pair of handmade deerskin gloves. A deep blue whetstone chipped from mountain ore. A splint for the three legged lamb, who now toddles from grass clump to grass clump with unrestrained curiosity. 

She brings him woolen blankets made from her flock’s fleece. He tells her that he prefers the scent of apples, and Annette promptly and ambitiously dunks them carelessly in water mixed with molten apple rinds and he laughs when she shows up the next day mortified with an armful of apple peel-y blankets. 

Once Felix brings her a spray of primroses, deep pink and fiery red at the center. Like her hair, he says shortly, his ears matching its exact hue of the flower’s heart. 

Annette gasps with delight and leans down to inhale a deep luxurious sniff of its sweet heady scent, and looks up to smile at him with exultation. She kisses him quick on the cheek, brief like a brush of butterfly wings, and Felix feels brighter than the sun in all of its neon gold. 

She teaches him a few wild strains of her ancestral herding call. He teaches her the hunter’s shrill whistles, created to mimic birds and draw in unassuming prey. They fill the forest with their wordless conversations. 

A single robin’s whistle means, “I’m going home early. Walk with me.”

The ending whoop of the kulning means, “I’m at the edge of the forest. Come see me.”

A thrush’s song means, “I am free. Come speak with me.”

The bridge of the herding call, pitched to carry, means, “I’m thinking about you.”

A warbler’s call means, “I miss you.”

But some words and some conversations will always require a human’s speech to convey. They learn to say many more things with far more expression to each other; what the nature of those exact words are, only the valley and the forest will know. 

But during that golden-green time when spring begins to bloom into summer, when Felix is stalking a buck through the mossy underbrush, a herding call will echo through the forest, and the hunter would smile and quicken his pace to hasten meeting the fiery-haired source of that haunting ancestral cry. 

.

.

.

_fin_

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!


End file.
